HEROIN: 'AN INSTANT LOVE AFFAIR'

Heroin, be the death of me

Heroin, it's my wife and it's my life

Because a mainer to my vein

Leads to a center in my head

And then I'm better off than dead

from the song "Heroin," by Lou Reed

When the needle finds the vein and discharges heroin into the
bloodstream, the user feels the effects in less than 10 seconds.

For Jim Switter, it took 35 years to wear off.

"It was an instant love affair," Switter, 53, says. "I felt I had
found my calling like a long-lost friend had returned."

In three weeks, he was a full-fledged addict. Switter has served
multiple jail sentences, lost more loved ones than he can count, and
nearly died himself a few times.

In May, Switter arrived at the Lowell House recovery center on
Appleton Street in Lowell. He was on parole after doing 6 1/2 years
for trafficking cocaine released on the condition that he enter
long-term residential drug treatment.

Switter wasn't too happy with the arrangement at first, but now he's
here until he's clean.

"There's only two ways out of this," he says. "It's either here or
it's in the grave."

Switter is one of 18 people 12 men and six women trying to reclaim
their lives at Lowell House.

The program lasts six months.

Some graduates become productive members of society.

Some are dead within a week.

Mike Davis of South Boston is a bear of a man, but his voice is closer
to a whisper than a roar.

He attended Northeastern University on a football scholarship and
later joined the pro-wrestling tour after graduating from Walter
"Killer" Kowalski's wrestling school.

While competing, he broke his leg in seven places. The doctors
prescribed the drug OxyContin for the pain. Like heroin, OxyContin
stimulates "receptors" in the brain providing powerful pain relief.
When used as directed, OxyContin is slowly released into one's system
and dulls pain over a period of several hours.

But when you crush the pills up and snort them, as Davis did, it feels
a lot like the euphoria of a heroin high.

After his wound had healed, Davis invented new ailments to get
OxyContin prescribed.

"I would cut my leg and put blood in my urine so they would think I
had a kidney stone," he recalls.

Eventually, Davis turned to a cheaper and more easily available
alternative: street heroin.

"Why do all that, go to hospitals and lie to get drugs, when you can
get a bag of dope for $10?" he asks.

As addiction tightened, Davis sustained his habit by stealing money
and jewelry from his mother.

"Nothing else mattered except that drug," he says. "I wasn't that
person my mother gave birth to. I was a different person."

This June, Davis overdosed.

During his three days in intensive care, he had a dream in which he
found himself in a dark tunnel. His dealer was at his side, directing
him toward a bright light.

As dream-Davis moved to do so, a hand reached out behind
him.

"I turned around, and it was my father," he says. "He said, 'Don't go
there. I've been there. You've got to keep on trying. There's a
purpose to life.'

"That's when I realized I needed help."

The first few weeks of recovery in detox and then at Lowell House
haven't been easy.

Withdrawal symptoms begin within hours of the most recent fix. They
include vomiting, diarrhea, severe anxiety, sweating, muscle pain,
insomnia, bone and muscle aches, shaking and chills. Nothing that a
nice heroin fix couldn't clear up.

Davis has dreams in which he wakes up with a needle hanging out of his
arm.

"I've been in so much pain," he confesses. "I don't want to be in pain
no more."

Melinda Martin, 24, wears a white baseball cap backwards with a blue
bandanna underneath. She's well-scrubbed and looks perfectly healthy.

Martin discovered drugs at age 12, experimenting with cocaine, acid,
marijuana and alcohol while growing up in the Hyde Park section of
Boston.

"It didn't get really bad until heroin," she says.

Like Davis, Martin's addiction began with OxyContin, though her use
was recreational. She turned to heroin once her habit became too expensive.

By age 21, she was consuming well over $100 worth of heroin per
day.

"Whether you mean to or not, you only hang out with people who do what
you do," she reflects. "It doesn't seem like an abnormal thing to wake
up and stick a needle in your arm."

Martin has had to rethink the stereotypes she once associated with
drug addiction.

"It could be your father or your mother," she says. "People get in a
car accident and get addicted to heroin. It's not just people from
ghettos.

"Addicts aren't evil people," she concludes. "The things they do, they
don't like doing that."

Pam Watson slumps way, way down on a beat-up old couch in Lowell
House's day room, unkempt brown hair tumbling across her weathered
face. Her black tank top reads "Baby Girl" in gold glittery letters
across the chest. Her shorts reveal most of her tattooed legs.

Watson, 33, mumbles a bit and tends to ramble as she tells her
story.

"I get angry when I think about it," she says. "I was (defecating) in
a bucket and peeing in a pan. I still remember the way it smelled, the
way it looked."

In her late 20s, having had one daughter taken away from her because
of her addiction and pregnant with a second, Watson found herself in
Brockton, sleeping in a station wagon and using a tent for a blanket.
She wanted to stay clean and says she did so for 18 months once, but
heroin proved too powerful.

"I loved my disease more than I loved my kids," Watson says. "I would
rather put a spike in my arm than have my kids in my life."

Watson's addiction has left her estranged from her family (her
daughters, now 8 and 5, currently live with their grandmother) but she
hopes to one day make things right.

"I'm here because I want a better life," she says.

Lisa A. of Brockton has tried "so, so many times" to beat
heroin.

"It's easy to talk about the things you have to do, as opposed to
actually doing them," says Lisa, who did not want her last name published.

Every time she thought she was on top, she'd visit old friends with
whom she used to shoot up and fall right back into the same habits.

Eventually, she realized that it wasn't her friends she was going to
visit.

Lisa graduated from the Lowell House recovery program early this year.
Now 46, she celebrated her one-year anniversary of being drug-free on
Aug. 28. She started using just before her 20th birthday.

When Lisa starts to feel weak, she remembers the pain and heartache
she caused her family.

"Sometimes I still think, 'A bag would really sound good right now,'"
she sighs. "But you're probably going to always have those thoughts."

She says the only way to stay on the straight and narrow is to take it
one day at a time.

"It's just left, right, left, right, left, right. One foot in front of
the other."

A total of 487 people died from opioid-related fatal overdoses in
Massachusetts in the year 2001, according to the state Department of
Public Health. In 2000, 363 died. As recently as 1990, it was only 94.
(Health officials believe the numbers are, in reality, even higher
because drug-related deaths often go unreported.)

The men and women at Lowell House are trying to keep from adding to
the body count.

The average Massachusetts heroin addict is a white man, 34 years old,
unemployed but not homeless. He has used other substances in the past
year, too most likely cocaine or alcohol.

He may have kids, but if he does, he probably doesn't live with them
anymore.

DPH doesn't keep data on whether addicts live in the city or the
suburbs. However, Dr. Wayne Pasanen, medical director of methadone
treatment clinics in Lowell and Lawrence, says his clients come from
all walks of life.

"We're seeing more and more younger people, all ethnic groups, a lot
of young people from suburban Lowell. Some are outstanding athletes,
some are very successful, housewives, business people," Pasanen says.
"It's definitely into the middle class, the suburban Lowell scene.
It's a much broader spectrum than people would ever realize."

Heroin use is on the rise in Massachusetts. That means not only more
deaths but more lives like the ones that exist at the Lowell House.
Men and women filled with alienation, despair, and anger at
themselves, at the drug that made them this way, at the world.

But the consequences don't stop there. The spiral of destruction
extends beyond addicts, beyond their friends and family.

Ultimately, addiction permeates the bloodstream of
society.

Tomorrow, The Sun will look at the heroin epidemic's impact on the
general public, and how state and local officials hope to solve this
growing problem.